Thursday 5th October

Our season continued in grand form last evening with Pete Whieldon and Animal Night,  yet another superb evening with yet another different take on photography.  Pete’s enthusiasm, his commitment and his absolute love of and respect for his subject matter simply shone out as he took us around the world with images that included bears, puffins, wolves, gannets, pumas and of course his beloved owls, two of whom accompanied him and sat observing us all evening – to our great delight.

Pete’s tales of his visits, mostly to the world’s colder regions, and his exploits were captivating – and indeed hair raising.  No need to worry, he told us, if a bear brushes past you, or you’re swimming without a cage with sharks, as long as you respect them, you’ll be fine.  This is a man whose dedication to his art has caused him to have specialist eye surgery to replace his lenses so that he doesn’t have the fogged up glasses problem in cold weather!

A number of our members know Pete and his workshops that are run from his Hampshire Hides, and he engaged us with a series of images from there of water voles, kingfishers, garden birds, harvest mice and – pride of place – the owls.  As David Harris said in his vote of thanks, he’d recently seen a flash of electric blue as a kingfisher sped over water and David had thought, even Pete Whieldon couldn’t have caught that.  After last evening’s showing, David wasn’t so sure!

We also managed to catch up with Ann McDonald who, very unusually, had not been with us at the Annual Exhibition Preview.  it was a great pleasure to present Ann with the Wilson Dent Cup for the Best Advanced Print and, by Members’ popular vote, the Coath Cup for Best Photographer.

Club Class and Intermediate members are reminded that the deadline for submitting PDIs for the first competition round is next Thursday, 12th October. And all members are reminded that any orders for Nomad Print boxes need to be with John Howes by the end of next Thursday session.

Lorna Brown, CCC Chair

Jean Brooks’s Three Sighted Mice , which was the cover image for the 2016 Annual Exhibition catalogue,was taken at Pete Whieldon’s Hampshire Hides base